Men with shaved heads, their bodies caked in white powder, move with precise slowness. Their motions and poses are often difficult to understand, but their faces can reveal expressions of either amusement or agony, similar to the masks of comedy and tragedy.
Sankai Juku, the all-male Japanese company that has been touring worldwide for almost 50 years with a popularized version of the Japanese style Butoh, has returned to the Joyce Theater for a two-week run with their 80-minute show “Kosa.” This performance is a compilation of excerpts from their older works, essentially a greatest-hits program. Known for their minimalistic yet breathtaking set design, “Kosa” has very little decor. As a result, the choreography and the artistic director Ushio Amagatsu’s essential vision are laid bare, and the exposure is harsh.
It would have been better if the company had also discarded their music along with the sets, as it has always been the weakest aspect of the Sankai Juku experience. However, the relaxing classical music is still present, mixed with cheap effects such as distorted electric guitar or the sounds of rockets and explosions. It feels like being in a massage parlor where a dystopian movie is playing.
Nevertheless, you can still appreciate the performers’ skills: the precision of their unique sign language, characterized by heavy thumb movements, claw shapes, and pointed fingers; the delicate elegance of their statuesque positions; and the smoothness of their runs. The lighting design by Genta Iwamura is subtle and nuanced, highlighting the slow poses and providing illumination to the dancers’ bodily shapes and surfaces.
The way the excerpts are stitched together is also skillful, creating an overlapping structure that maintains the flow. However, for me, this prolonged the seemingly never-ending nature of each section and the entire evening. Sankai Juku has long lacked the provocative power to disturb or the mysterious quality that the best Butoh possesses. When the dancers move quickly, clouds of white powder linger briefly in the air, but unfortunately, little of what Sankai Juku presents has any lasting emotional or metaphorical impact.
Therefore, when four dancers gather like a secretive group, smirking and lifting their skirts to show leg, playfully painting each other’s faces, breaking into silent hysterical laughter, and pointing at the audience, they appear like the Three Stooges stripped of their slapstick humor. And when a soloist slowly crosses the stage diagonally, staring upwards, eventually contorting his face in pain, it lacks the mesmerizing, profound, and time-bending qualities. Instead, it becomes tedious. “Kosa” is simply dull.
Sankai Juku
Through Nov. 5 at the Joyce Theater; joyce.org.